Nora: I told you I don’t need the master! I’ll be coming into this with less money than you will be.
Erin: Yeah but I’ll be coming into this with more humans than you will. Anyway, you need privacy. What if you’re entertaining gentleman callers?
Nora: Not happening.
Erin: Oh, come on. It will happen eventually. Maybe we should look for a duplex so you don’t abandon me when you find a proper man.
Nora: First things first. Let’s talk bedrooms AFTER we have a down payment together. Besides, we talked about this.
They had. They’d agreed that if Erin ever remarried and wanted to expand her family, or if Nora’s domestic circumstances changed, they would sell the house and split the proceeds, each of them ideally walking away with a nice chunk of equity. That part had been important to Nora, despite the fact that she felt certain she was never dating again. But according to Erin and the therapy-industrial complex, eventually that feeling would go away.
Erin: You and your logic. Sheesh. I gotta go pry the boys away from their screens. Night-night.
Nora: Hang on, one more thing. How is Grandma?
Erin: Pretty good! As stoic as ever, anyway. Her new fave topic is how she never liked Rufus.
Nora smiled and, buoyed by the exchange with her sister, deleted Rufus’s texts without reading them and his voice mail without listening to it. Grandma was right. He was exhausting. Which, actually, was a relief. Being exhausted by Rufus, rather than hurt by him, felt like progress.
All right. She’d had a lovely evening with new friends, and the clinic would open in two weeks.
The reset button had been fully and firmly pressed.
She typed the last text she would ever send Rufus. I don’t want to talk to you. Here’s my mailing address in Moonflower Bay. If there’s anything we *need* to talk about, legally or whatever, send me a letter. I’m blocking you now. Have a nice life.
That should do it. They hadn’t been married. She had happily left him all the joint possessions they had accumulated. There was nothing left to bind them together. If she was overlooking something, and if it was important enough, he could send her a damn letter.
When she got back home, she went out back, gingerly poked at the rotten deck with her toes until she found a chunk that seemed like it might not collapse under her weight, sat on it, and listened. The ad for this place had said you could hear the lake from the yard.
And she could. Just barely, but yes, there was the sound of waves.
She was alone, and it was okay.
Chapter Four
On Saturday, Nora hit the mall in nearby London to tackle the problem of household linens, and then she put in a long afternoon at the clinic. She was tired and a bit cranky when she got home, but the sight of Jake Ramsey’s truck parked in her driveway made her smile.
And wasn’t that interesting?
There was quite a racket coming from out back. She let herself into the house, dumped her shopping bags, and went straight to the sliding glass door that opened onto the backyard from what would have been the dining room had she had any actual dining furniture.
He was facing away from her, doing something with a power tool she was pretty sure was some kind of saw. He didn’t notice her watching him through the door as he turned and laid a long, flat piece of wood into place.
He was fixing her deck.
Well, crap.
Her throat tightened.
She had spent too much time the last few days pondering the nature of loneliness. Which was the only reason she could think of to explain why this—a little bit of human kindness in the form of a guy building a deck—was going to make her cry.
No. No, it was not. She allowed herself one sniff and looked for something to distract her.
Jake was wearing grungy jeans and beat-up brown work boots.
And he was not wearing a shirt.
It was really hot out.
So that made sense.
Not wearing a shirt when you were working in the heat was a logical, normal thing that logical, normal people of the male variety did.
She, however, was wearing what felt like half a gallon of Benjamin Moore Black Satin. She had spent the afternoon painting the front desk at the clinic. It had been a whim. The desk that had come with the practice had been a 1970s monstrosity made of fake wood paneling. She didn’t want to spend the money